


bony fingers

by lethandralis



Series: like an infection gone septic; part of his blood [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: As One Does, Depression, Disordered Eating, Gen, Suicidal Ideation, Violence, and then going on the run for several years, the sort of bone deep depression one might get from killing their brother, this is less writing and more longform journaling through a character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-14 23:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8033827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethandralis/pseuds/lethandralis
Summary: three years of killing and gallons of blood will do something to a man, something that isn't quite easily erased.





	bony fingers

He wakes up most days with a whanging headache. In three years he’s grown used to it, and his liver is probably suffering under the sheer volume of how much ibuprofen he takes, but who cares. He wakes up again today with the same dull pressure behind his eyes, rolls over in bed and gropes for the pill bottle. He takes them dry before rolling upright.

Three years last month since it happened and he’s been alone ever since. It’s not legal for him to be here; technically it’s not safe to be anywhere in Japan, considering the number of convictions on his head. Sometimes late at night he tallies them up, what a judge would say to him had they ever caught him. First degree murder, extortion, money laundering, fraud, assault, unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful discharge of a firearm. On and on and on. Too dizzying to consider for too long. He wonders if a judge could convict him on being generally deplorable.

He’s good at lying low, though. Wears long-sleeve high-collar shirts that don’t betray the full sleeve tattoo, his most readily identifiable characteristic. Tries to stay on the move, never stays in one place longer than a few weeks at a time. Never repeats the same location more than once a year. He has so few possessions by now that they can fit in a backpack and a small suitcase with space to spare. In a tiny metal case he keeps in his (locked) suitcase are ten different fake ID cards from three countries, and he rotates through them and the names on them as he needs to. Tomorrow he will leave this cramped studio apartment for a new place, a new town, a different name.

He makes his money doing what he’s good at: slinking through shadows, taking people out systematically. People who want others dead have a way of finding him, and he has a way of making it happen. They pay him in cash, which in turn is how he pays everyone else. His sort of work gets him a job once a month, maybe twice if he’s busy, but each job on its own is plenty to coast on.

This apartment has been nice; he’s rented it for a few weeks from a kind old woman who had the unit vacant between a move-out and a move-in. She hadn’t asked when he’d paid her up front in a big stack of cash, neatly rubber-banded together. She’d just asked if he needed anything.

The place came unfurnished, but upon hearing his story (“I’m a travelling businessman, my work has me posted here for a while dealing with negotiations with another company, all the hotels nearby are booked solid for the summer”) she had dug out a musty futon and some other Spartan essentials for him to use, free of charge. Her smile was the tired, worried sort of someone who’s seen too much trouble in a long, unrelenting life. He had made a mental note to leave a tip upon leaving.

He leaves the apartment every weekday by 9 AM, returns late in the evening. Feigning a schedule he doesn’t have. It helps him keep his cover; a typical businessman wouldn’t loaf around the apartment all day doing nothing like he wishes he could. His actual work tends to take place at night, anyway; it’s easier to put an arrow through the brain of a sleeping target. He’s not about to get turned in by a gentle old woman, though. So he leaves.

Three days in to this particular stay, he found a secluded spot by a riverbed where he could hide out mostly unbothered for the days. He does target practice on a tree across the river, leaves to get food in town when he grows hungry. Sometimes he just sits the whole day, staring at the rustling leaves. Considering.

He’s long since accepted the mantle of what he is. Wears it with squared shoulders and a bitter frankness. “I killed my brother,” he says to himself sometimes, under his breath. “I killed my brother and I left a massive gang family that will no doubt someday have my head for fleeing as I did.” Sometimes, sitting in shitty bars with shittier beers late at night, he laughs about it. “Ought to be dead already.”

Once in a bar far north of here, last year, someone had caught him talking to himself and asked after the comment. He’d told the story, foolishly; he was three beers and four shots of vodka in and if someone turned him into the police, how did it matter?

But nothing happened. The stranger at the bar with the worried eyes had passed him off as another idiotic drunkard, telling lies to garner attention and maybe a free drink, maybe a ride home. Even now Hanzo remembers sobering up on that walk home to memories of the sounds of screaming, the scrape of metal on bone.

His prosthetic calves and feet spark worryingly sometimes; on the back of the right knee plating is a section where the metal has come loose, exposing wiring and circuitry. He figures someday he’ll go see a doctor somewhere far away for it, someone who can fix the wear and tear on his aging body without betraying who he is or why he has them. But he’s not in a rush. He covers the wiring with cheap electrical tape from a hardware store, keeps his leg propped up when he bathes. No use worrying about it now. It’s not about to kill him.

He wonders sometimes what it must have been like to be Genji, cowering under the strokes of a razor-sharp sword. Hanzo hadn’t snuck up on him, although in retrospect that would have been the smarter option. He’d asked his brother to train with him, asked him to bring his favored weapons, but stopped training halfway through. Slunk around behind him and tried to slip the tip of his sword through his brother’s ribcage, missed, sent it through his side instead.

His brother had taken his legs, had taken large strips of flesh from Hanzo’s wide back. Hanzo took his life. _Not a fair trade._

People ask him about his legs sometimes, when he makes the mistake of wearing clothing that exposes them. He passes them off as prosthetics for a birth defect, and succeeds. Hanzo gets trousers custom tailored to fit over the bulky steel knee plating, wears shoes over his custom-engineered feet. He doesn’t need to, but he does.

He does a lot of things he doesn’t need to. He returns in dead of night once a year on the day he struck his brother down. To atone. To pray.

Every pilgrimage comes at a massive risk of being discovered by his family, of being tossed aside just as they instructed him to toss Genji aside. The entire Shimada estate is heavily guarded. He knows what the guards are capable of. Every year he wears a set of clothes his father gave him, sleek silk, custom made to fit his frame. Traditional archer’s clothing, all emblazoned with the Shimada family seal, laying bare the ludicrously expensive sleeve tattoo his family had started for him when he was seventeen.

A challenge. _You know who I am. If you want to take me down, now is your chance._ He figures it would be appropriate for him to die in the same place as his brother. Fitting.

It is June, now, and Hanzo figures that someday he will end this three-year-long in-between, that someday he will exit this purgatory he has constructed for himself. There are very few ways out of here. He can attempt to atone with his family (very risky, and highly unlikely; abandoning the clan as the heir apparent to the criminal empire left the remaining leadership bitter, angry, and scrambling). He can go somewhere as far away as he can and try to remake himself (also very risky; he has long since accepted that he is too distinctive looking to hide in plain sight, and cosmetic surgeries to change himself are expensive with long recovery times that would leave him vulnerable). Or he can die.

There are lots of ways to die. Sometimes the headaches pass into his eyes and he wonders if he isn’t dying slowly, now, as he carries on in his strange nothing life. Sometimes he wakes up with a gun to his head and fights the hand that holds it, on instinct, but wonders if he couldn’t just lie there and take it. Shimada guards are not trained to take prisoners. They shoot to kill. _Conserves bullets_ , his father had always said. _Conserves resources_. Hanzo is always faster, though. He trained some of these guards.

Today there is no Shimada guard asking if he has any last words. There is nobody to kill for a while. There is a healthy sized stack of cash in his suitcase, a dismantled Storm Bow in its case, a shitty kettle sitting on a shitty hotplate boiling water for his tea as he stretches out the kinks in his back. Tomorrow he will leave this town. He has plans to fly to Singapore for a while. Someone there has contacted him, asking for his unique talents, and who is he to pass up a paying customer?

The kettle whistles at him, aggravating his headache, and he swears at it as he pours the water into his mug. He is nearly out of tea. He will need to buy more.

He doesn’t eat like he should anymore. Usually he gets one meal a day, grazes here and there. Three months ago he weighed himself in a hotel gym and came to find that he’s lost twenty-five pounds since he left his family, primarily in muscle mass. It doesn’t matter. He can still find the strength to pull a bowstring, deliver an arrow straight into someone’s skull. Who cares about the rest?

Today he dresses, slings his backpack over his shoulder (Storm Bow and a quiver of arrows packed neatly inside, along with two apples, a bottle of water, and all the cash to his name), and leaves at 8:44. The spot down by the riverbed is empty again, dead silent except for the occasional rustling of leaves. He re-assembles his bow, nocks, takes aim for a particularly prominent knot in a tree about thirty feet away. Misses. Spends twenty minutes swearing about it as he tries to steady his shaking hands. _Low blood sugar_. Defeated by his own body, Hanzo sits down, eats an apple, drinks half his water.

After half an hour, his hands have steadied. He retrieves the failed arrows from the other side of the dried-up riverbed, and returns to target practice. Falls into the mechanical rhythm of practice that he’s had for the past two and a half years. Reach back, nock, aim, fire, evaluate, repeat until he runs out of arrows. Retrieve, stretch, repeat again. The actions are long since locked into muscle memory, but they require just enough concentration to dull his thoughts.

He passes his day as he does near every day, alternating between practicing and resting against the trunk of a large tree. Late afternoon alerts him to his grumbling, painful stomach, and he decides to get some food in town.

Supper is another silent meal at a shitty restaurant that he pays too much for, but it quells his headache and soothes his shaking hands. He tips generously, heads back to his shoebox apartment, inspects it as he does with every room he stays in, every night. He finds nothing out of the ordinary, no Shimada family tracking devices, not an item out of place.

Sleep, he knows, will not overtake him for several hours now. He switches on a slow playlist of wordless music from his phone and busies himself with tidying his apartment. His flight leaves at 10:30 tomorrow morning, and he does not intend to be rude to his host by leaving he apartment a mess. There are some things he can do to make the trail he leaves behind himself less gruesome.

The inky black smoke clouds around the edges of his mind as he washes before bed. He gets this most nights, as he starts to consider whatever needs to be done tomorrow; _or you could die, Hanzo, take that pretty little sidearm you keep in your bag and stick it in your mouth. Get it over with._ He washes his hair, rubbing circles in his scalp with calloused fingertips, tries and then fails to dull out the steady drumbeat of thoughts. Some days it is easier, some days it is not. So it goes.

He’s got no plans, he’s not a danger to himself. Has been, was, in the past, but isn’t now. Hanzo steps out of the bath, dries himself off, and wonders if this part of him will ever change. Three years and gallons of blood on one’s hands do something to you that can’t quite easily be erased, he figures. Not much to be done about that.

A person who rented a hotel room next to his in Seoul had looked his slumping frame up and down and had asked him if he needed help. _I know a doctor in Incheon who can get you meds under the table,_ they’d said, quiet, invading his personal space. _Whatever you think you need, she’s got it. Want her number?_

He’d declined, politely, swiping the keycard to his room and stepping inside. What could some synthesized neurotransmitters do to wipe away three years of death?

His body gives way around midnight, the steady mechanics of his brain dropping off in favor of dark silence. His alarm is set, his bags are packed. There is a gun under his pillow that he hopes he does not need to use. He would like to make this flight.

He dreams tonight about his childhood bedroom, on the third floor up, a large window to the eastern side of the compound. Floor to ceiling panes of sparkling glass, flanked at either side by cobalt blue curtains. He dreams of walking out and falling.

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, so, sometimes you just feel like garbage and you have to write something very sad and shitty in order to get it out  
> i dunno why i'm letting this see the light of day but here it is, now! and you've read it!  
> [tumblr](http://lethandral1s.tumblr.com) || [twitter](http://twitter.com/lethandralis)


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